Hey! Thanks for writing all of this up. A few questions, in no particular order:
The CFAR fundraiser page says that CFAR “search[es] through hundreds of hours of potential curricula, and test[s] them on smart, caring, motivated individuals to find the techniques that people actually end up finding useful in the weeks, months and years after our workshops.” Could you give a few examples of curricula that worked well, and curricula that worked less well? What kind of testing methodology was used to evaluate the results, and in what ways is that methodology better (or worse) than methods used by academic psychologists?
One can imagine a scale for the effectiveness of training programs. Say, 0 points is a program where you play Minesweeper all day; and 100 points is a program that could take randomly chosen people, and make them as skilled as Einstein, Bismarck, or von Neumann. Where would CFAR rank its workshops on this scale, and how much improvement does CFAR feel like there has been from year to year? Where on this scale would CFAR place other training programs, such as MIT grad school, Landmark Forum, or popular self-help/productivity books like Getting Things Done or How to Win Friends and Influence People? (One could also choose different scale endpoints, if mine are too suboptimal.)
While discussing goals for 2015, you note that “We created a metric for strategic usefulness, solidly hitting the first goal; we started tracking that metric, solidly hitting the second goal.” What does the metric for strategic usefulness look like, and how has CFAR’s score on the metric changed from 2012 through now? What would a failure scenario (ie. where CFAR did not achieve this goal) have looked like, and how likely do you think that failure scenario was?
CFAR places a lot of emphasis on “epistemic rationality”, or the process of discovering truth. What important truths have been discovered by CFAR staff or alumni, which would probably not have been discovered without CFAR, and which were not previously known by any of the staff/alumni (or by popular media outlets)? (If the truths discovered are sensitive, I can post a GPG public key, although I think it would be better to openly publish them if that’s practical.)
You say that “As our understanding of the art grew, it became clear to us that “figure out true things”, “be effective”, and “do-gooding” weren’t separate things per se, but aspects of a core thing.” Could you be more specific about what this caches out to in concrete terms; ie. what the world would look like if this were true, and what the world would look like if this were false? How strong is the empirical evidence that we live in the first world, and not the second? Historically, adjusted for things we probably can’t change (like eg. IQ and genetics), how strong have the correlations been between truth-seeking people like Einstein, effective people like Deng Xiaoping, and do-gooding people like Norman Borlaug?
How many CFAR alumni have been accepted into Y Combinator, either as part of a for-profit or a non-profit team, after attending a CFAR workshop?
Where on this scale would CFAR place other training programs, such as MIT grad school, Landmark Forum, or popular self-help/productivity books like Getting Things Done or How to Win Friends and Influence People?
I would suspect that the data about the effectiveness of Landmark that you would need to make such an assessment isn’t public. Do you disagree? If so, what would you take as a basis?
There are a few people who could respond who are both heavily involved in CFAR and have been to Landmark. I don’t think Alyssa was intending for a response to be well-justified data, just an estimate. Which there is enough information for.
Hey! Thanks for writing all of this up. A few questions, in no particular order:
The CFAR fundraiser page says that CFAR “search[es] through hundreds of hours of potential curricula, and test[s] them on smart, caring, motivated individuals to find the techniques that people actually end up finding useful in the weeks, months and years after our workshops.” Could you give a few examples of curricula that worked well, and curricula that worked less well? What kind of testing methodology was used to evaluate the results, and in what ways is that methodology better (or worse) than methods used by academic psychologists?
One can imagine a scale for the effectiveness of training programs. Say, 0 points is a program where you play Minesweeper all day; and 100 points is a program that could take randomly chosen people, and make them as skilled as Einstein, Bismarck, or von Neumann. Where would CFAR rank its workshops on this scale, and how much improvement does CFAR feel like there has been from year to year? Where on this scale would CFAR place other training programs, such as MIT grad school, Landmark Forum, or popular self-help/productivity books like Getting Things Done or How to Win Friends and Influence People? (One could also choose different scale endpoints, if mine are too suboptimal.)
While discussing goals for 2015, you note that “We created a metric for strategic usefulness, solidly hitting the first goal; we started tracking that metric, solidly hitting the second goal.” What does the metric for strategic usefulness look like, and how has CFAR’s score on the metric changed from 2012 through now? What would a failure scenario (ie. where CFAR did not achieve this goal) have looked like, and how likely do you think that failure scenario was?
CFAR places a lot of emphasis on “epistemic rationality”, or the process of discovering truth. What important truths have been discovered by CFAR staff or alumni, which would probably not have been discovered without CFAR, and which were not previously known by any of the staff/alumni (or by popular media outlets)? (If the truths discovered are sensitive, I can post a GPG public key, although I think it would be better to openly publish them if that’s practical.)
You say that “As our understanding of the art grew, it became clear to us that “figure out true things”, “be effective”, and “do-gooding” weren’t separate things per se, but aspects of a core thing.” Could you be more specific about what this caches out to in concrete terms; ie. what the world would look like if this were true, and what the world would look like if this were false? How strong is the empirical evidence that we live in the first world, and not the second? Historically, adjusted for things we probably can’t change (like eg. IQ and genetics), how strong have the correlations been between truth-seeking people like Einstein, effective people like Deng Xiaoping, and do-gooding people like Norman Borlaug?
How many CFAR alumni have been accepted into Y Combinator, either as part of a for-profit or a non-profit team, after attending a CFAR workshop?
I would suspect that the data about the effectiveness of Landmark that you would need to make such an assessment isn’t public. Do you disagree? If so, what would you take as a basis?
There are a few people who could respond who are both heavily involved in CFAR and have been to Landmark. I don’t think Alyssa was intending for a response to be well-justified data, just an estimate. Which there is enough information for.